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This section will look at what SFQM has done to enable Measuring Telco Traffic
and Performance KPIs.

Fig. 5.1 Measuring Telco Traffic and Performance KPIs

The very first thing SFQM enabled was a call-back API in DPDK and an
associated application that used the API to demonstrate how to timestamp
packets and measure packet latency in DPDK (the sample app is called
rxtx_callbacks). This was upstreamed to DPDK 2.0 and is represented by
the interfaces 1 and 2 in Figure 1.2.

The second thing SFQM implemented in DPDK is the extended NIC statistics API,
which exposes NIC stats including error stats to the DPDK user by reading the
registers on the NIC. This is represented by interface 3 in Figure 1.2.

For DPDK 2.1 this API was only implemented for the ixgbe (10Gb) NIC driver,
in association with a sample application that runs as a DPDK secondary
process and retrieves the extended NIC stats.

For DPDK 2.2 the API was implemented for igb, i40e and all the Virtual
Functions (VFs) for all drivers.

With the features SFQM enabled in DPDK to enable measuring Telco traffic and
performance KPIs, we can now retrieve NIC statistics including error stats and
relay them to a DPDK user. The next step is to enable monitoring of the DPDK
interfaces based on the stats that we are retrieving from the NICs, and relay
the information to a higher level Fault Management entity. To enable this SFQM
has been enabling a number of plugins for collectd.

collectd is is a daemon which collects system performance statistics periodically
and provides mechanisms to store the values in a variety of ways. It supports
more than 90 different plugins to retrieve platform information, such as CPU
utilization, and is capable of publishing/writing the information is gathers to
a number of endpoints through its write plugins.

SFQM has been enabling two collectd plugins to collect DPDK NIC statistics and
push the stats to Ceilometer:

ceilometer plugin: A write plugin that pushes the retrieved stats to
Ceilometer. It’s capable of pushing any stats read through collectd to
Ceilometer, not just the DPDK stats.

Fig. 6.1 Monitoring Interfaces and Openstack Support

The figure above shows the DPDK L2 forwarding application running on a compute
node, sending and receiving traffic. collectd is also running on this compute
node retrieving the stats periodically from DPDK through the dpdkstat plugin
and publishing the retrieved stats to Ceilometer through the ceilometer plugin.